1973 Battle of the Sexes turned the Astrodome into a circus

One of the most storied events in the history of the Astrodome was the Sept. 20, 1973, tennis match dubbed “The Battle Of The Sexes,” which pit 50-something tennis veteran Bobby Riggs against Billie Jean King, then just 29 years old.

Faster and younger, the hard-charging King ably beat the retired Riggs, who had been a tennis star in the ’40s and ’50s. He was wily, yes, but past his prime. King took home a $100,000 payday.

“I’ll put Billie Jean King and all the other Women’s Libbers back where they belong – in the kitchen and the bedroom,” said Riggs in interviews leading up to the match, which he had been proposing to King privately for years.

King claimed that Riggs would be scraped off the court at the Astrodome.

This would be the second of three tennis battles between the sexes that Riggs would be party to. Before taking on King, Riggs had defeated Margaret Court in a match the previous March. A third match came in August 1985 with Riggs teaming up with Vitas Gerulaitis to challenge Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver to a doubles match. Yes, Riggs and Gerulaitis lost, with Riggs a hindrance to the world champ.

The Dome match is still the most-watched tennis match in television history, with the circus atmosphere bringing in thousands of gawkers looking to either see maturity prevail over youthful hubris, or old shambling bones falling to bits against a reigning champ who was then first-class in her sport. She would win 39 Grand Slam titles in her career.

In 2008, the Chronicle’s Dale Robertson spoke to Houston oil and gas attorney Nick Stephens for the 35th anniversary of the match. Stephens served as one of six ball boys and girls that night. According to Stephens, the kids won their spots by playing the previous weekend in a tournament sponsored by the Chronicle. Stephens, then 13, was one of Houston’s best juniors.

“Bobby was really quite a gentleman, and Billie Jean was such a class act,” he told Robertson. “It was a big night, with lots of famous people there. I remember the crowd (30,472, the largest ever for a tennis match) and being pretty nervous.”

Writer Mickey Herskowitz noted in 2001 that those muscled jocks who carried in King into the Dome like an Egyptian queen weren’t just any jocks, they were Rice University jocks.

“You hesitate to call it sport, but the night was grand theater — when it wasn’t a throwback to the days of flagpole sitting and goldfish swallowing,” wrote Herskowitz. “Riggs took the male chauvinist angle as far as he could, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, King entered into the spirit of the encounter.”

But now nearly 40 years later, a former co-worker of Riggs at a Florida country club is alleging in an ESPN “Outside The Lines” profile of the match that Riggs lost on purpose to appease the Mafia, to whom he owed over $100,000.

Hal Shaw, now 79 years old, told ESPN that Riggs was in deep with the Mob for outstanding gambling debts. Riggs’ son Larry left the door open, saying he was not entirely sure of his father’s intentions, but admitting the man had friends in shady places. The elder Riggs was reportedly a hustler and gambler, betting on himself at Wimbledon in 1939, reportedly earning $105,000 on a $500 Hail Mary.

The exploits of late performance artist and comic Andy Kaufman, who took on women in late-’70s wrestling matches with the same gusto, weren’t much different than what Riggs was selling. As for the faux chauvinist Riggs, it seems that four decades later he and Kaufman had a little bit in common.

The Battles of the Sexes in 1973 is on a list of memorable events that took place at the Astrodome over its history, right next to Evel Knievel jumping 13 cars on a motorcycle, Wrestlemania X-Seven (the seventeenth if you can smell what the Rock is cooking), and those six Elvis Presley shows I wrote about here a few weeks back.

Riggs slept in the Tarzan Room at the nearby AstroWorld hotel during his stay in Houston. It had an actual rope swing, leopard-skin everything, green plastic jungle greenery, and green shag carpet to mimicking jungle grass. You can still stay in a version of the room at the hotel, now a Crowne Plaza.

3 Responses

I don’t buy the Mafia story because I can’t imagine any serious money being bet on Bobby Riggs. I did see the match on TV that night, it was even televised in Dallas. I would have liked to have seen the match a lot closer to add to the drama but the ultimate outcome couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. Wouldn’t it have been a treat to have seen a match between Billie Jean King in those days against Bobby Riggs at his peak? The Bobby Riggs of the 1940’s? Now THAT would be a sight!